The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Al Stewart’s
rare 1995 album, Between The Wars.First CoffeeSM purchased his copy
of this CD a few years ago for $29.95, and notes it’s up to $89.99 on
Amazon.com now:

Regular readers of this space know that First CoffeeSM is
endlessly amused by these studies “forecasting” broadband connections over the
next ten years, VoIP usage in six years, Wi-Fi penetration in three years or
whatever, all down to the tenth of a percentage point.

This morning

Datamonitor

’s announcing the availability of

“The
Definitive Guide to the IVR Marketplace: North America and EMEA,”
which “finds” that spending on traditional IVR licenses will dip from $277
million to $179 million in North America and EMEA by 2009 even as spending on open-standards
IVR licenses will grow from $166 million to $332 million.

“‘Traditional’ touchtone interactive voice response used by
businesses over the past two decades for the purposes of phone-based routing
and self-service functionality, is firmly in its twilight years,” Datamonitor
concludes, confidently predicting that revenues from proprietary touchtone IVR
in North America and EMEA will decrease by more than 35% through 2009.

Where will this smart money go? To open-standard IVR
platforms such as Voice-XML and SALT which make better use of web
infrastructure, improve functionality and can graduate to speech technology.

Traditional IVR is based on proprietary languages. As such,
maintenance, upgrades and back-end data integration is expensive, complex and
causes vendor lock-in. No doubt Datamonitor’s on the money when they say the emergence
of open standards will improve the functionality and availability of higher
quality phone-based applications in the market.

Datamonitor predicts fairly aggressive growth, forecasting
the North American and EMEA businesses spending in open-standards IVR platforms
to double in the next five years to over $330 million and the average
annual spending on speech-enabled IVR in the US and EMEA markets to increase by
13.4% during that time.

Point-four, now, not 13.5%.Sheesh.…

The U.S. Justice Department is dropping its antitrust investigation of
Philippine Long Distance
Telephone Co., the largest telecommunications
company in the country, as well as investigations of several other Philippine
telecommunications firms.

U.S. justice authorities were
probing Philippine telecommunications firms for alleged unfair competitive
practices when in February 2003 they increased to a similar rate the fee they
charged for handling calls originating from U.S. telephone companies.

No action will be taken against
the firms.

…

3 Hong Kong

has launched what it’s billing as “the world’s first 3G user-self-enabled
video conference service.” It’s designed to allow up to four 3’s customers
to participate in a video conference anytime and from different parts of the
world.

3 Hong Kong explains rather redundantly that the new tool is
an “easy-to-use video conferencing service completely self-enabled by the 3G
user” without the need for pre-booked, operator-assisted service.…

First CoffeeSM remembers when cell phone technology went mainstream
it was embraced by Eastern European countries as a way of leapfrogging the
whole tiresome
put-in-a-national-telephone-wiring-infrastructure-that-actually-works phase and
cutting straight to wireless. It appears that the

Voice over Internet Protocol

could
do the same thing for Africa and other underdeveloped parts of the world.

What makes wireless technologies attractive
to Africa is the continent’s lack of fixed infrastructure, according to Paul
Budde, the managing director of BuddeComm, an Australia-based telecommunication
business consultancy company which tracks the African communications sector.

In the Philippines the government-owned Telecommunications
Office is acting to use VoIP to provide telecom to unserved areas in the
countryside. One step towards progress was to reclassify VoIP from a voice
service to a value-added service, which any company can offer. Naturally this
has squared ISPs off against traditional telcos, which quite reasonably fear
ISPs offering commercial VoIP services.

“Algeria, Kenya, Mali and
Mauritius have within the last year enacted telecommunication regulations that
allow for the deployment of both VoIP and Wi-Fi,” according to Michael
Malakata. In many countries special laws are needed to get commercial VoIP
around heavily-regulated national telecommunications providers.

Kenya has just made VoIP legal, and South Africa wants to use it to attract the
sort of call center business India’s profited from. Algeria’s approved licenses
allowing ISPs VoIP and Wi-Fi for international calls.

…

The World Wide Web Consortium has started a Mobile Web Initiative designed to improve the
quality of the web experience for mobile devices.

At the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan, web inventor and
W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said mobile access to the web has been “a
second-class experience” for far too long: “MWI recognizes the mobile device as
a first-class participant, and will produce materials to help developers make
the mobile web experience worthwhile.”

The Mobile Web Initiative’s participants will initially
focus on two areas: best practices and mobile device descriptions. The best
practices group will develop authoring guidelines, checklists, and best
practices to help content providers develop web content that works well on
mobile devices.

The Device Description Working Group will address the
development of improved device description solutions, a database of
descriptions that can be used by content authors to adapt their content to a
particular device.

Preliminary results, in the form of standards
recommendations, are slated to be available in late 2005. So far, W3C has
raised about $640,000 for three years to fund the initiative.…

Those who suffer from

paraskevidekatriaphobia
are going to have a rough day today. They’re in good company, however, as fear of Friday the 13th is
probably the most widespread superstition in the United States.

With real-world effects: Few hospitals, high-rise buildings
or hotels have a 13th floor. Airports rarely have a Gate 13. A
British study found that fewer people drive on Friday the 13th than
on Friday the 6th, yet hospitals report more accidents.

And Donald Dossey, founder of the Stress Management Center
and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina cites estimates that $800 or
$900 million is lost in business because people won’t fly or pursue other
normal routines on Friday the 13th.

The origins of the superstition
are lost in the mists of time – it’s not some ancient Christian/Catholic thing,
a study done in 1894 found that the Islamic Turks so disliked the number 13
they practically never used it if they could at all help it, and ancient Hindus
and the Norse believed it was unlucky for 13 people to gather.

First CoffeeSM finds a credible theory in the
fact that ancient Egyptians considered the quest for spiritual fullness to
occur in 12 steps in this life and the 13th was the eternal afterlife. So 13 came to
mean death, in a good way, since you were transformed into spiritual glory, but
after the nice connotations perished with their culture the death imagery
remained with the number 13.

Couple that with the fact that there were 13 people at the
Last Supper and Jesus Christ was crucified on a Friday – the day of the week
for executions in pagan Rome – and you have a practically shrink-wrapped
superstition for Western culture. Readers of The Da Vinci Code know that the Knights Templar were effectively destroyed
on Friday the 13th, October 1307.

What’s strange is that the number 13 has long been
considered unlucky, Friday’s been considered unlucky, yet there is no evidence
that people before the 20th century considered Friday the 13th
a particularly unlucky day. It’s a purely modern superstition which nobody can
explain. Which, of course, is how a good superstition ought to be.